Fuller, Samuel B. "S.B."

Impact on the world

Starting with a $25 loan against his car, Fuller and his future wife, Lestine Thornton, began selling soap door-to-door in 1929, incorporating Fuller Products Company the same year; by the 1950s the company — built primarily on customers in Chicago's rapidly growing South Side and later the South — had grown to 300 products, 5,000 salespeople, and roughly $18 million in annual sales, making Fuller quite possibly the wealthiest African American of the decade. In 1947 he secretly acquired Boyer International Laboratories, the white-owned company that had originally supplied his soap, to prevent its bankruptcy and secure his supply chain; he became the first Black man inducted into the National Association of Manufacturers in 1963. Beyond his own company, Fuller became the era's essential trainer of Black business talent, mentoring John H. Johnson of Johnson Publishing and George Ellis Johnson of Johnson Products directly, and financially backing civil rights figure Dr. T.R.M. Howard, a mentor to Medgar Evers, as Fuller Products' medical director.

Life & background

Born June 4, 1905, in Monroe, Louisiana, to a family of sharecroppers so poor he left school in sixth grade to work, Fuller began selling goods door-to-door at age nine and moved with his family to Memphis and later Chicago as a teenager after his mother's death left him and six siblings to fend for themselves. He served as president of the National Negro Business League for several terms in the 1940s and 50s and headed the South Side Chicago NAACP, while remaining an outspoken Black Republican whose free-market rhetoric occasionally drew criticism and boycotts from other Black leaders. Charged in 1968 with violating federal securities law after selling unregistered promissory notes, he was placed on probation and Fuller Products entered bankruptcy in 1971; in 1976, in declining health, he handed control to his protégé and top distributor, Joe L. Dudley Sr., who eventually purchased the company outright in 1984. Fuller died of kidney failure on October 24, 1988, in Blue Island, Illinois, survived by his wife, five daughters, and dozens of grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

Sources

1. Encyclopedia.com; HuffPost; FEE.org